Elizabeth Warren makes a Republican friend

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has found a Republican friend in the Senate: Bob Corker.

Warren, the national liberal icon and fierce Wall Street critic who unseated former GOP Sen. Scott Brown, reached out to Corker after her election victory to ask the Tennessee lawmaker to serve as her GOP mentor as she begins her Senate career.

Text Size

Corker agreed and the two lawmakers sat down together in December for 30 to 45 minutes in the GOP senator’s office when Warren was in town for freshman orientation.

The pairing is part of an informal effort started a few years ago to promote a more collegial atmosphere in the Senate, with veterans of the chamber helping freshmen adjust to their new jobs.

But it could prove to be a provocative policy pairing of high-profile Banking Committee members if the Senate takes on issues such as housing reform and possible changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial oversight law, which created the consumer watchdog agency Warren championed.

Warren promises to be a leading Democratic voice on banking issues and Corker has for years sought to be a bigger player on the financial policy beat, although his past efforts to strike deals with Democrats, including over Dodd-Frank, have fallen short.

On many of the biggest issues facing Congress, such as tax and spending policies, the two have advocated starkly different positions and finding common ground on issues before the Banking Committee will be no easy task either.

For now, the senators say they haven’t started talking policy.

“It was just a ‘get to know you better’ kind of a meeting and I thought it was very constructive,” Corker told POLITICO. “She’s obviously very smart ... and I know that we’re going to be involved with her office. Candidly, I like seeing people like her that are going to be active on the committee.”

Warren’s outreach to Corker reveals a strategizing lawmaker feeling out her turf in the upper chamber and building personal allies with Republicans with whom she might see eye-to-eye on certain policy issues, industry observers said.